


The Cat That Comes Back

by kvikindi



Category: Black Widow (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 08:49:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2806619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is this other world, where people have cats and lose them. She doesn't know how to be part of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cat That Comes Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [resplendeo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/resplendeo/gifts).



 

A red-headed woman walks through Brooklyn. She looks young, the sort of woman you'd call a girl. Fair skin, a snub nose, a ponytail, a parka. She's not a girl. She's been alive for a long time. But you'd be forgiven for not knowing that at first.

She walks through Brooklyn in winter. It's winter, but not winter as she knows it. Not yet even snow on the streets. Here and there some in the air, but this is now her kind of climate. She was made to go slipping through forests in snowfall, a shadow between the moon and the air, and here she is below the rattling cage of train tracks, pushing past the would-be purchasers of fruit from food carts. They frown as they hold persimmons in their hands. They don't notice her: a slip of a girl, designed not to be noticed. Camouflage, it's called in the wild, which is: the skill to blend in, or, put it another way: to cease to exist.

She is ceasing to exist in the winter in Brooklyn. Why? Why is she so far from home? —Too long a story to share here. Why here, on this street corner, so close to the seaside? —She's looking for something. What is she looking for? —Bad luck. And why would she want that?

* * *

Лихо is the name of this bad luck, in the Russian. Лихо, which sounds like Leah if you say it fast enough. Tender-eyed Leah, known for her weeping. But let's stick with the Russians, and stoic misfortune. Лихо, here, is a little black cat. Always underfoot, wet nose, paws on Natasha's pillows.

Oh, didn't we stop to say? Natasha. Natalia Alianovna Romanova. That's our red-headed, snub-nosed girl's name. No one calls her that, of course; she's American now. When you immigrate you change some part of your name, even if it's a sound, the lost shape of a vowel. And maybe that's important, an important distinction. Who you were is not who you are in this place. It's not a conscious shedding; it's something you can't help. Natalia Alianovna cut a different kind of figure. She was заварка, the strong dark part of the tea; she was the bone of the ballerina's toe; she was the swan who kills the hunter. But Natasha: Natasha is someone different.

Natasha drinks wine, careless, barefoot, looking out over the sunset. Natasha laughs. Natasha has a soft heart for strays. She has this cat, and she calls it Liho, and she lets it into her house. Into her home; into her life. And now it's run away.

* * *

Here's the thing about bad luck: it's not supposed to leave you. You say that you want it to go away, but you think that it won't. That's what you secretly know, in your heart. And that's enough, sometimes, isn't it— to have something that won't go away? Sometimes even misfortune can be a companion. Maybe that's why— but her misfortune left. A little black curl of cat crawled out the window; her Лихо went inexplicably away, and so she's out here without meaning to be out here, thinking: How do you call bad luck? How do you call a cat? This is not her realm of expertise.

She wanders, dodging the kids who hurtle with backpacks, searching the fences and the fire escapes. One cat in New York City is so little, so nothing. She stops and asks a man selling kebabs from a cart. Her Egyptian Arabic is perfect. But no, no; he's seen nothing today. Nor the bodega owner, nor the Argentinian baker. They look at her like: you waste my time with this? Which she understands. It's not a life-or-death mission. It's a cat. People drown them in bags. She's drowned worse things in bags, over the years. Natalia Alianovna would've—

But she's not Natalia Alianovna anymore.

* * *

The thing is— the thing is, as the sun starts setting, with the black bricks of Manhattan cutting strips out of it, and the air goes winter-blue and smells of car exhaust and snowfall, it gets to her. It makes her sad. Sad? Just a little bit. Like a bad wound to the thigh, you know it's not life-threatening, but all the same for a while it'll hurt like a bitch. She thinks about calling... who would she've once called? Well, she thinks about calling Clint, but he'd be all easy comfort, all American boy, tufts of dirt-blond hair. She thinks about Matt, but Matt doesn't know about caring for something. He might someday, maybe. But not yet. For some reason she thinks there was a time, there was a telephone number, there was— but she doesn't know why she thinks that.

She doesn't have many friends, she thinks. She has partners. She has Isaiah. But not the easy kind of friends, the normal kind of friends, the friends they talk about in a magazine's back-page quiz: "What Kind of Friend Are You?" She's the friend with the gun. The friend with the cold eye. She hasn't gotten that far away from her past. Sometimes she does brunch, but she sits with her back to the wall. She can't talk about her job. She has no family. No homeland. She's a weapon in a white blouse, eating home fries and eggs Benedict. It's not her world, though she performs its gestures. Her skill on stage was always consummate. But now she's here; here: she sits on a doorstep, holding the weight of her phone in her hand, and she could call up a friend for an assassination, for a black op, but not to say, "I've lost my cat." There is this other world, where people have cats and lose them. She doesn't know how to be part of it.

So she sits, and stares out into the night. At the little windows with their lights going on, the little windows behind which people live. And eventually a woman comes up the steps, not Russian but Polish, maybe, with a long black coat and a scarf on her head, and American Natasha helps her, courteous, with the door, and then asks, on a whim, "Have you seen a black cat? About so big? I've lost her."

The woman shakes her head. "But," she says, "you know what it is with cats. You must think, where is it I'd go, if I were a cat? Very clever, cats. Clever as the devil. Ah, my Malenkiy— he used to could open up a door! How a cat can do this?"

Natasha smiles. "Thank you," she says.

* * *

Where is it Natasha would go, if she were a cat? Oh, to have such claws and teeth! Would she run away, would she wreak her vengeance? Go spitting and snarling into the alleys of Brooklyn? Leave this city for a larger adventure? Bad luck can make a living most places; trouble's made its name. And after all, an animal belongs to no one, really. Just because they live under a single roof. How can a cat understand love: a person feeds you, gives you water, and from this you're supposed to interpret emotion? You crawl into their lap and they touch your soft fur and this means— what? What's the meaning of this? No; a cat should split; a cat should do as it likes. A cat has no loyalty to anyone.

Where would I go, she thinks. Where would I want to go.

* * *

She goes home to her very clean, very cool apartment. She doesn't keep much inside of it. Still, after all these years of not running. But she knows the creak of the boards, the set of the doorframe. She turns on a lamp, a warm infusion in the darkness. She knows already what she'll see; and how does she know that, a cognitive error, surely— but there is Liho, curled on a sofa cushion, not even regarding her, sound asleep. Through the open window, the air lifts the curtains. There's the sound of car horns. Taillights leak from beyond, red in the night, anonymous Brooklyn.

Natasha crosses the room and closes the window. She eyes Liho there, the trouble that comes back, the trouble that she knows by name. In the morning that cat will wake her with its nose against her shoulder; against her neck; insistent: feed me, love me. Somehow they have intuited these steps, this strange pattern. They must be doing it right. They must be doing okay.

She pours herself a glass of wine and sits on the sofa. She rests her hand against the black fur. A little more, she thinks; a little more every day; a little more of being an animal in this world, a little closer to being a living thing...


End file.
